Reflection on the beginning half of Japanese class.

I have been able to remember a lot of new vocabulary this semester. It helps to only write the nouns that I didn't already know and then just study those. There have also been a lot of new verbs (like 落ち込む、乗り遅れる、アイロンをかける etc.) We learned a lot of new grammar too, which has been fun. Thins like ～ておく、A時B、といいですね、といいんですが、みたいです。The hardest one out of all of those was probably A時B, and it took a lot of practice to get that right (and still not entirely sure if I've got it.) However, Yuki-sensei's video helped and the amount of practice we did in class did as well. It is more hard to make my mind think of it in a different way from English, than to actually do it. Because it does not really make sense from English, so the trick is just teaching your brain to think of it in a different way. ～ておくwas also a little confusing to make sense of, because we don't have an equivalent expression in English. I think I understand that one though. We did a lot of in class practice and homework on that one too. The amount of time we spent on each of the grammars felt proportionate to how difficult they were and that was a big help. :)

The most effective thing for my learning is just thinking about the vocab and grammar in my head. For confusing grammar it is trying to work out a way of thinking of it that makes sense. Also studying the grammar pages that Yuki-sensei hands out in class helps too, as they have all the rules on one page, and they are easy to find in my folder. For the next half of this semester I don't think I am going to do anything different, as the system I've got seems to be working so far. I will be sad when this class is over though as it is my favorite. :( It's been a good time.

おちこんだ時、何をしますか？
ジェームズさんはおちこんだ時、お酒を飲みます。
メリットさんはおちこんだ時、テレビゲームをします。
ジャックソンさんはおちこんだ時、アニメをみます。

Reflection of When Movie

I understood the grammar through the movie. The video is not confusing at all, a visual of the grammar in action helps. Especially the one with Masashi coming to the house. Depending on when you clean your room you just change the form. The one thing that I still am a little confused about is, does the verb at the end of the sentence always stay present tense? Or are there situations in which it would be past tense? The way to structure this grammar makes a lot more sense now though. I think of it the same way as presented in the video and can not really come up with a way that would make more sense to a native english speaker. You just have to thing of what is happening first in the sentence, and after practice it'll definitely become easy.